Things are looking up in a Norfolk village that prides itself on having blooming summers after new lamp posts started to appear in the flower-loving community.

Things are looking up in a Norfolk village that prides itself on having blooming summers after new lamp posts started to appear in the flower-loving community.

Filby, near Yarmouth, is celebrating the arrival of more than 70 street lighting columns because it means they will be able to deck their village with eye-catching hanging baskets from next week.

The new arrivals are a victory over health and safety killjoys who tried to stop Filby being decorated with floral baskets.

Now hanging baskets should be the key to helping the village win the accolade of being East Anglia's best-kept village, a title it has held for the last nine years.

Filby in Bloom was stunned in January when it was told volunteers could not put up any 20-kilo baskets on lamp posts this summer because the columns were crumbling away and could topple over and injure or even kill people.

But Yarmouth Borough Council relented on its contentious decision and bought forward its lamp post replacement programme to ensure the village, which draws thousands of visitors every summer, would be covered in fantastic flora.

And in a further boost for Filby in Bloom all the new lamp posts have built-in brackets for baskets.

Adrian Thompson, chairman of the bloom campaign, said: “It is very good to see the new lamp posts going up as hanging baskets are the cornerstone of Filby in Bloom.”

Yarmouth Borough Council told Filby that it could not put up hanging baskets on the old columns after a survey of the borough's street columns revealed that 15 per cent of them should be condemned on health and safety grounds.

After the EDP revealed the health and safety row, the council decided to bring forward its replacement lighting column programme for the village by several months.

Including floral displays in barrels, there will be 170 hanging baskets in Filby, which is entered for both Britain and Anglia in Bloom this summer.

There will also be a commemorative flowerbed planted in honour of the Far East Prisoners of War Association.